MusRef Blog

This second edition of Nicholas Ivor Martin’s operatic repertoire guide was published earlier this year as a part of the Scarecrow press’ “Music Finders” series. It assists opera production staff in selecting operas during season planning, as well as in preparing for an opera production. Martin includes operas that are most often performed and/or are most likely to remain in the repertory over the long term, with preference given to works for which scores are readily available. Organized alphabetically by original-language title, entries include information about sets, acts, length, arias, staging hazards, scenes, categorization of roles, chorus roles, dance, orchestration, publisher, and score copyright. The volume includes five indexes: Operas by Title, Operas by Composer, Librettists, Arias, and One-Act Operas.

Routledge Music Bibliographies presents its own contribution to the topic of women in music in their annotated bibliography Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide.

Authors Karin Pendle (Professor Emerita of Musicology, College-Conservatory of Music at University of Cincinnati) and Melinda Boyd (Assistant Professor of Music History, University of Northern Iowa) have created a collection of sources that covers this broad, yet extremely relevant, area of study within music and culture.

Over 3,000 entries can be found in the second edition of this bibliography, published in 2010. Aimed at scholarly audiences, Women in Music maintains a relevant focus of scope, targeting sources (mainly books, scholarly articles, dissertations, and some electronic sources and documentaries) that refer specifically to gender and feminism in scholarly music literature published since 1980.

Major subtopics falling under the large umbrella that is “women in music” are included in this volume. Such source topics range from general histories of women in music to more specific areas such as music education, ethnomusicology, and other issues of gender such as homosexuality and women’s financial support within the industry. In addition to these topical headings, several chapters in Women in Music focus on bibliographical sources. Entries about female composers and musicians from both classical and popular music genres are covered. While the sources cited in this volume are mainly in English and other Western European languages, their content reaches an international level (more so than its earlier edition). Indexes by name, author/editor/translator, and subject are also provided.

Fans of Gustav Mahler may find a great deal of value in a volume such as Péter Fülöp’s extensive Mahler Discography. Through this volume, readers may experience Mahler’s works in a way that is novel and relevant.

Fülöp describes the discography as including “all known Mahler recordings ever issued for sale or given out as complimentary or promotional copies” in disc format. While there is an emphasis on American recordings, the discography does have an international scope.

One of the primary unique aspects of Mahler Discography is its means of presenting information with multiple approaches. Each of Mahler’s major works has its own section within the discography. Recordings are listed by work title, artist, label, and timings. Fülöp’s method of organizing each individual recording involved creating unique accession numbers for every entry. Once the reader understands the accession number (which is explained in detail in the preface), it becomes fairly easy to locate entries and derive information from them. Several details about each recording are provided, including conductor name, major performers’ names, recording date, and matrix number are included for most entries.

In the world of music reference, are used to seeing many books by a few giant publishers play a dominant role in the collections. There are, however, less dominant houses that continue to release excellent and highly useful reference books. Frank Daykin’s Encyclopedia of French Art Song is an example of this.

Published by Pendragon Press, this encyclopedia (which also functions as a simple dictionary for some terms) is designed to acquaint users with the meaning and cultural context of any word they will see printed on a page of French art song by any of the four cornerstone french melodists, be that word in the poetry, in a performance instruction, or elsewhere. Entries include song titles, poets, proper nouns, artistic movements, poetic terms, idioms, song dedicatees, nouns, and adjectives. The organization is alphabetical with standard, cross-referenced entries.

This encyclopedia does not include reference or biographical information on the composers themselves, as that area is throughly covered in a variety of previously published sources.

The online catalog The Clarinet Quintet (https://clarinetquintet.web.unc.edu/) is an attempt to bring together all the repertoire of one specific chamber ensemble, the string quartet with one clarinet. The website evolved from the personal records of Donald Oehler, clarinet professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has collected information over decades of professional career in chamber music and clarinet performance and pedagogy. Graduate students and librarians at the UNC-CH library developed this idea into a WordPress website managed by Prof. Oehler.

At the time of this post, the website lists about 370 clarinet quintets, though an additional 230 have been identified and eventually will be added. Each entry includes (where this information is available) the title, composer, composer’s country of origin, year of composition, publisher(s), duration, type of clarinet, and a sample page. Users can view a list of the quintets sortable by composer, year, and duration or browse by clarinet type, range of years, duration, country of origin, female composers, and works in the International Clarinet Association’s collection. Featured works date from the late 18th century to today, beginning with the composition that inspired the genre, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A (1789). Users with additional information or corrections on compositions are welcome to comment on the individual entries, subject to moderation.

Irma H. Collins’ Dictionary of Music Education is a “resource for research and a landmark of professional reference for exploring the evolution of music education through time.” (Quoted material from the foreword.) It emphasizes entries concerning people, terms, events, and organizations that have played the largest roles in influencing the course of music education throughout history, especially in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The organization is alphabetical in a fairly standard dictionary format, although entries tend to be a little longer and more detailed that one would expect in a standard dictionary. There are three appendixes of important organizations, important publications, and institutions for music. It also contains a bibliography for further reading and an eleven-page chronology.

This annotated bibliography from Routledge’s extensive series leads scholars and performers researching the history and music of Giuseppe Verdi to printed materials by indexing and describing the most important studies on the subject. Prepared by Gregory W. Harwood, it includes the author’s selection of research about Verdi that had been printed in English, Italian, French, or German by 2010. Harwood excludes materials written for a popular audience, materials in program booklets, articles from nineteenth-century periodicals, textbooks, general histories of music and opera, theatre chronicles, master’s theses, unpublished European dissertations, reviews, musical scores, and librettos.

The bibliography is organized topically, then alphabetically by author last name. Entries contain standard bibliographic information, including ISBN where available, with annotations. The main body of entries is followed by a catalog of Verdi’s compositions (with title, description, librettist, and premier information) and a “Biographical Dictionary of People Associated with Verdi.” There are five indexes: Authors, Editors, and Translators, Subjects, Verdi’s Music (General), Verdi’s Music (Specific Compositions), and General Index.

These directories from Routledge, one for classical and one for popular music, are hefty volumes that music business and performance professionals can use to find background and contact information for potential colleagues and collaborators. Each contains biographies of about eight thousand entrants, with information about the person’s career, education, repertoire, recordings, compositions, publications, honors and, where available, personal and contact details. Entries are organized alphabetically by family name.

The classical volume includes prominent people in both classical and light classical music, including composers, conductors, instrumental and vocal performers, arrangers, managers, and writers. The popular music volume covers people working in of pop, rock, jazz, rap, dance, world, blues, gospel and country music.

The information in these volumes is also available in a subscription-based online database that is updated quarterly.

This addition to the Routledge series of music bibliographies leads scholars researching the history and music of Edward Elgar to works by the composer and printed materials about him. Performers can also use it to find information that will inform their interpretations of his music. It is divided into three sections, the first of which is the thematic catalogue. This includes first-time publications of works composed between 1866 and 1933 and is organized chronologically by the date of composition. Compositions in this catalogue are not assigned catalogue numbers, but entries include title, incipit, manuscript location, date of composition, edition information, and literature about the composition.

The second section, a bibliography, includes author Christopher Kent’s selection of letters, monographs, articles and collections of articles, discographies, scrapbooks, and a wide variety of other sources written by or about Elgar. It is divided into twelve sub-sections by source type or topic. Entries within sub-sections are then organized alphabetically by author last name with standard bibliographic information plus ISBN where available. Unlike most other books in the series, the bibliography is not annotated (a decision which was made to save space in the book for the thematic catalogue).

Section three lists the contents of various public and private collections and archives devoted to Edward Elgar. Three indexes list Elgar’s compositions, writers of sources in the bibliography, and proper names mentioned in the volume.

This meticulously illustrated encyclopedia provides history and descriptions of instruments and instrument families from around the world. It surveys a wide variety of musical instruments from cultures across all inhabited continents, including wind, percussion, and string instruments. The authors have organized it by region of instrument origin, then by instrument class and subclass. Region headings provide commentary on music and culture, and instrument entries provide the name, a description, and a hand-drawn illustration. A six-page introduction to organology preceeds the main encyclopedia, giving readers a chance to understand the system of instrument classification that the authors use throughout the volume.